Reception of the Half Moon and Clermont.
The last week in September is apt to be blessed with fine, mild weather in New York, and this time it held good. No more beautiful day could be wished than Saturday, September 25, 1909, when the banks of the Hudson River for ten miles from its mouth became the vantage ground for many more than a million sightseers, with the great stream itself a Broadway of the water over which the floating procession was to pass. Toward the City shore the long line of the gathered warships stretched adrape with gay bunting. Behind the water-front packed with human beings from the Battery Park to Grant’s tomb and beyond, rose the great mass of the city, its lifted turrets and spires and its soaring buildings forming a majestic background. Power spoke in every line and mass that met the eye, and beauty of a kind seldom seen gave its impress of delight. Down the harbor, the fleet of steamers was gathering in its hundreds, every craft from great Hudson River and Sound steamers and private yachts to squadron upon squadron of tugs. All were flag-draped and all were laden with joy-bound participants. The Brooklyn shore down to Fort Hamilton at the Narrows, and the heights and shore of Staten Island from Fort Wadsworth curving around the harbor were black with human beings. Hard by the Kill von Kull lay the Half Moon and the Clermont, the one a quaint, picturesque ghost of the great days of adventure of the early seventeenth century, the other in its long square ugliness a reminder that adventure with steam power in a new element was concerned with fitness and not with beauty; that Fulton was thinking of the turning of his ridiculous paddle wheels rather than the looks of things. And on the Dutch craft stood a make-believe Henry Hudson with a Dutch crew clad in the sea-dogs’ garments of his time. What a dim, pathetic figure that real Hudson of whom here was the twentieth century shadow. He must have been a man of grim purpose and of strong flesh and blood, but never did a man so near our time fade out into the mist more completely than he who first sent the prow of a white man’s ship up past the Palisades and the Highlands. On the Clermont was also a goodly company rigged out in the habiliments of 1807 that still bore something of the lines of the dandies of Paris in the time of the Directory. But it was a man of Robert Fulton’s blood who impersonated the creator of the first steamship that could truly navigate, and that meant that there was Irish blood in him.
It was when the procession in the course of the afternoon began to move with our long slim darting torpedo boats escorting the Half-Moon and the Clermont and all the other steam craft following that the true glory of the day began, and as the vessels swung into line heading northward every piston-beat of the engines, every turn of the churning screws and splashing paddles seemed to make a chorus of Fulton! Fulton! Fulton! and in a precious undertone to many a thousand of the onlookers it murmured Ireland! Ireland! Ireland! whence came the brain that had put a heart of giant power into every floating fortress, every giant of the transatlantic trade that the great flotilla passed as it swept up the river. As the little ship of Hudson and the ungainly master-boat of Fulton passed, the fleets of the world saluted them. So they passed up, acclaimed from the banks and the stream, the Half-Moon and the Clermont halting at the picturesque water gate on the Riverside slope for the reception ceremonies where the dignitaries waited from the Governor of New York state down.